Possibly Triggery: What Is Happening To Our Kids?

[aishah]

Originally Posted by Kobi

There doesn’t appear to have been a whole lot of that sort of self-and-other awareness going on in George Huguely’s home. His father, George Huguely IV, described to a reporter by friends as a barfly, was accused by his ex-wife Marta of physically barging into the family home to reassert his dominion according to divorce court records acquired by Washingtonian magazine. George V, who beat his way through Love’s door before assaulting her on her last night, was a young boy at the time of that incident. On the morning of the murder, his former teammate later testified that George had started drinking while out playing golf with his father and was visibly intoxicated by the time they left the golf course. George later admitted to having at least 15 drinks on the day of the murder.

[B]In the wake of Love’s death, the Landon School embarked upon an extended period of “self-examination,” the Washington Post reported in 2010. The University of Virginia began a “Are you your sister’s or brother’s keeper?” awareness campaign, and students launched a program aimed at training their peers in recognizing and combating alcohol abuse and relationship violence. These are undoubtedly good things and will, one hopes, raise awareness in such a way that students in the future who see a friend veering down a self-destructive path will speak out to their teachers, coaches and school counselors. But the most meaningful intervention that could have changed the course of the lives of these two particular UVa students would have been for Huguely’s parents to have recognized the pathology making its way down the family line and to have forced their son to seek help while he was still a minor, and they still had the ability to do so.

Unfortunately, even today, few parents, particularly in the privileged and status-obsessed sorts of milieus in which Love and Huguely were raised, are willing to look hard at the ugly problems playing out amidst the hustle-bustle of their everyday family lives. No matter how much our awareness and knowledge of domestic violence and mental illness have evolved in recent decades, it’s still all too common to shrug off verbal abuse as Mommy or Daddy’s “bad mood.” Too easy to dismiss night after night of nonstop drinking as a way to “relax” after a hard work day. Too common still to shrug off unacceptable behavior — red flag sorts of behavior — as boys-will-be-boys hijinks.

i found this article interesting because i was in grad school at uva when love was killed and i lived directly across the street from her. i was just back in town visiting a couple of weeks ago when the trial started. i didn't know her, but our area and the entire uva campus were crawling with media afterward. at first (and sometimes even well after) the local media coverage was done in a way that was really victim-blaming and avoiding of placing blame on huguely. it made me really angry.

i don't feel that uva actually changed in a meaningful way after love died. there's a new on-campus initiative (student-run) called the white ribbon campaign to bring awareness to intimate partner violence, but it doesn't have a lot of visibility. as far as i know, a lot of the harmful traditions around binge drinking that uva has haven't changed at all (and there are a LOT - not to imply that drinking and ipv are always related but just to underscore the lack of, well, give-a-damn that seems to go on there with regards to creating an environment that's healthy for student). overall the feeling i've gotten being around uva after this incident has been mostly that it was a sad, isolated incident but it has no connection to anyone's day to day life. which isn't actually the case at all.